Searching for a Small Poem

Kinda pressed for time and a little swamped, so I thought it a good time to post a short poem.

But which one?

I am not a poet but I am a (mild) fan of the art. Ray Bradbury advises writers of any age to read poetry, preferably on a daily basis. I try to, but I don’t always. I was skimming through some poems of Ezra Pound’s, but nothing seems to be calling out at the moment. Behind me is a stack of a half-dozen thick anthologies: Shelley, Browning, Tennyson, Whitman, Longfellow, Blake, but, nah, all that’s too highbrow at the moment. (I’m bingeing on those little bite-sized mini-chocolate bars while the wife and little ones are out – hey, it’s either that or down a couple of beers.)

So what to post?

Tempted to re-post on “Ulysses,” by Tennyson, hands-down my favorite. But what more could I possibly add without embarrassing myself? Best to just re-type it in to the blogging software without comment. But hey, that’s what I did a few days ago with a pared-down “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Hmm. A thought to skim through Whitman momentarily flashed through my brain, but I’m not in the mood to leap about the room praising glorious humanity and all that it is that makes me a man.

What the heck to post?

I really wish I liked Gerard Manley Hopkins. For a long time I thought I did. He was a Jesuit – and hey! I’m a Catholic – and I tried, really tried, to get in to the spirit of his work. But after awhile I just realized – and I hope not to sound blasphemous, no, I don’t want to intend this as blasphemous – but, I realized his poems are little but clever tongue-twisters. There, I said it.

But it still doesn’t help me. I need a neat little poem to post.

Oh! I have one. I remember, let’s see … way back in the early ’90s, must’ve been 1992, I’m going to say, because it was around the time I was at Seton Hall and I had my first solo apartment … I remember making a conscious decision to explore two areas: classical music, and poetry. As for the classical music, well, I posted a bit about that early in the history of this blog. As for the poetry, I went to my local library and, not knowing any better, borrowed two encyclopedic tomes – one on Carl Sandburg, one on Robert Frost.

Both poets are okay, but they don’t particularly move me. Well, let me rephrase and say they don’t particularly move me consistently. But I do remember liking one poem by Frost enough to photocopy it (and I’m not talking about “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” – a poem more overexposed than Barack Obama). That poem, without comment literary or ideological, is this:


U. S. 1946 King’s X

Having invented a new Holocaust,
And been the first with it to win a war,
How they make haste to cry with fingers crossed,
King's X--no fairs to use it anymore!


I like it. It’s short, simple, sweet. A nice contrast of childishness in the face of something monstrous and evil (again, intended without ideological bias one way or the other). Plus, back in those long-haired Les Paul days, the only CD you’d find on my stereo would be any one of the five or six of a very heavy [Christian] hard rock band called … King’s X.